Software not entitled to be installed and unallocated licences?

[JohnMMcLaughlin]

Service Now Gurus,

I need your help in understanding what I am doing wrong.   I am in the process of setting up the Software Asset Management and am using SCCM to do my discovery, I'm starting simple and just looking at our main OS - Windows 7.

I have created a Software Model with a licence type of 'per workstation', I have then created a software licence linked it to the software model I created above and set the number of rights to 605.   I then linked the Windows 7 discovery model with the software model and have created a counter, when I click the 'Count Licences' button, the counts update to tell me:

Rights owned = 605

Rights used = 700

Immediate Compliance = 95,

so far everything is working as I expected it too.

Now if I click on the Software Asset Management Overview link, I see the default layout in the middle there are two graphs, one entitled 'Software that has not been entitled to be installed' Windows 7 shows 700, the graph next to it entitled 'Total number of unallocated licences' shows Windows 7 - 605, but yet when I filter my Software Discovery section for Windows 7 it lists 700 devices as having Windows 7 which is correct.

Now my question - do I have to manually add an entitlement for each device to have a Windows 7 licence, shouldn't this be updated by the SCCM discovery?

Thanks in advance for your help,

John.

[Sharath Chandra · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

SCCM currently does not do it and should be done manually.

Functionally, SCCM cannot always assume the devices on which the software is installed is entitled to use it. There could be a case that there are devices which are not supposed to have the software installed and SAM admin is supposed to take an action, like asking the owners of the devices to uninstall the software or after further analysis SAM admin entitles the devices to use the software.

Please provide your business case, we can evaluate and consider this as an enhancement

Regards,

Sharath

[JohnMMcLaughlin]

Sharath,

Thank you for the clarification.

John.

[Community Alums]

Hi John,

As Sharath states, SCCM cannot tell which of the installations you want to entitle. This could be particularly tricky as you do not currently have enough rights to cover all 700 installations in your scenario (at least as you describe it, but it could just be part of your testing). The easiest way to handle this moving forward it to make entitlements/allocations as part of the request process so you know who is supposed to be using those rights. Many companies will start out, though, truing up what they have (purchasing enough rights to be compliant) and then allocating rights to those who currently have the software.

So, how can you quickly get these allocations created? There are a couple ways. If you have enough rights, you could create a script that goes through each installation of the software and creates an allocation record for that device or user (depending on how the software is licensed). This can get tricky, though, if you have multiple purchases to line up where the script should apply the allocations, unless you just have it cycle through the available licenses.

Alternately, if you want to do this code-free, you could do something like I describe in this blog post: Feel Entitled to Quickly Entitle Software. You can create a spreadsheet with the entries you want (you could easily get the CI names for the device allocations from the Software Installations list). This can give you a better visual for where to allocate the rights, too, because you can see the mapping without relying on the script.

There are pros and cons to each approach, but either should help you arrive at your ultimate goal.

Hope this helps,

Ben

[vab_13]

if you have a Hi account, you can submit your enhancement request via:

https://hi.service-now.com/hisp

Service Catalog => Service Request =>   Create New Enhancement Request